On the disappointing end of the spectrum was Eva Braun: Life with [...]]]> Although I’ve only read three books this year, my early effort at spontaneity over planning in my reading selections means two of those books were biographies of two women at about the same time. They resulted in impressions as different as the subjects.

On the disappointing end of the spectrum was Eva Braun: Life with Hitler by German historian Heike B. Görtemaker. There is little available by which to evaluate Braun. Any correspondence she had with Hitler has been destroyed or disappeared. The only extant diary consists of 10 entries in the first half of 1935. There are few contemporary descriptions of her. As a result, Görtemaker tries to piece together a picture of Braun through others.

Although Görtemaker relies on and cites a wealth of sources, some of her “primary” ones come from acquaintances such as Albert Speer or Herman Göring’s wife, Emmy. Their comments come from statements given Allied forces after the war or post-war memoirs. In many cases, though, she discounts these sources as being influenced by efforts to distance the individuals from Hitler and his regime. This leads Görtemaker to explore the story of Hitler and to look at the lives of a variety of people near or around him during the same periods Braun was.

While that is an ingenious approach, it doesn’t really produce the intended result. The reader spends as much or more time reading about others and what they thought than about Braun. Ultimately, whatever conclusions the reader or Görtemaker might draw as to Braun’s views, ideas and the like can’t rise above the level of speculation. Although it may be predicated on decent analysis, it is still speculation. In the end, we don’t really learn much about Braun and her life with Hitler.

Where Görtemaker was forced to rely on a dearth of direct information, the opposite may be true for Robert K. Massie and Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. There’s not only plenty of documentation about and contemporary accounts of the Russian empress, she penned her own memoirs.

Having read a biography of Catherine in 2008, I wasn’t necessarily interested in reading another lengthy book about her. The good reviews the book received and the fact Massie also wrote well-received and award-winning biographies of Peter the Great and Tsar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs, led me to pick it up.

Given the length of Catherine’s rule, the nature of her accomplishments, the changes in Europe and Russia during her tenure and the wealth of available information, Massie does an excellent job presenting the information. One of the knocks on biographies is that they can be dry. Massie, however, makes the book, some 575 pages, quite easy to read. In fact, if anything it may seem almost too casual at times. Still, to the extent this type of readability spurs on readers who might not otherwise tackle longer biographies, the payoff is worth it.

Massie provides an excellent and well-rounded picture of Catherine from her youth until her death. It is an accomplished and notable introduction to a woman who truly deserved the appellation, “the Great.”

Philip Guedall

Petiot, a French physician, was convicted of murdering 26 people in Paris during World [...]]]> World War II is often seen as the last “good war,” a clear-cut conflict between good and evil. And there was plenty of evil to go around, not just in the Axis forces. Take, for example, the case of Marcel Petiot.

Petiot, a French physician, was convicted of murdering 26 people in Paris during World War II. As David King explores in unprecedented detail in Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris, there were likely many more, perhaps up to 100. Petoit claimed he was a Resistance member who killed Germans and collaborators. Others, like the jury, said he used a phony escape network to lure people — and their money and valuables — into his deadly clutches.

One thing is clear. Petoit took advantage of the horrors of the war. As King points out, when thousands of people are disappearing and dying, who will think the disappearance of a couple people they know is the work of a serial murderer? And what person of Jewish descent is going to approach authorities in Nazi-controlled France to report a missing relative? After all, 33,000 Jews alone disappeared in France an 11-week period after Nazis began a mass round-up of Jews in mid-July 1942, some 13,000 in Paris in just 48 hours.

Although Death in the City of Light has somewhat of a choppy feel, it is thoroughly researched and told. King doesn’t present it as some sort of mystery tale. The reader fairly well knows from the outset that Petiot is involved or responsible. A preface sets the stage with police fortuitously discovering dismembered body parts and bones, as well as bodies in a in a coal stove and lime pit, in property owned by Petoit. The balance of the book is given over to the ensuing investigation, the search for Petoit, and his trial. With the investigation as a framework, King explores Petoit’s background, including him becoming a physician after getting a 100 percent mental disability rating following his service in World War I and potential murders prior to the war, as well as life in Nazi-occupied France, Petoit’s scheme and some of his victims.

Police concluded that, acting under the pseudonym “Dr. Eugène,” Petoit claimed to be part of a network that could help people escape France to Argentina by way of Spain. Not only did they pay varying sums of money, they were instructed to arrive at their ultimate rendezvous in Paris with their most valuable possessions packed in no more than two suitcases or sewn into their clothes. Police would later discover 49 pieces of luggage Petoit hid containing hundreds of items — but no money or valuables. Petoit had also remodeled the property in which the human remains were found, including the construction of a small triangular room with solid brick walls about 8.5 inches thick containing only eight iron hooks a false door on the walls and a concealed peephole. Petoit’s escape network cover was good enough that he was actually arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, although he was released after several months.

In contrast, Petoit claimed that as member of the resistance he headed up a cell of what he called the Fly-Tox network. The network’s main job, he said, was to track down and execute informers, although it also helped Frenchmen escape Paris. The method of finding these informers? Cell members would follow any civilian leaving Gestapo headquarters in Paris and, once in a secluded place, seize them with the Fly-Tox operative posing as a member of the German secret police. If the individual protested that he worked for the Germans, “he convicted himself,” Petoit told investigators. He claimed to have killed 63 “collabos” but that it was Fly-Tox’s escape operation that led to his arrest by the Gestapo. He said the bodies and remains police found in his building must have been dumped there while he was in Nazi custody.

The detail with which King explores the story is aided by the fact that not only did he have access to trial materials, including a stenographic record no one thought existed, but also the complete police dossier, which had been classified since the investigation began. The book struggles a bit because there were so many possibilities pursued during the investigation and, at times, the reader may become perhaps as befuddled as police were during the investigation. King also occasionally lapses into asides on what individuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Pablo Picasso were doing in Paris during this time. Although they add somewhat to setting the scene of Nazi-occupied Paris, their relationship to the story or its flow is inconsequential.

Death in the City of Light is a fair and in-depth examination of Petoit’s case. It also contains an intrinsic question of perspective. If the prosecutors were right, Petoit clearly was a serial killer. But if Petoit was killing people he believed to be informants, does the fact he did so in the course of a “good war” render him any less morally culpable?

David King, Death in the City of Light

The Farmers’ Alliance and the political parties to which it [...]]]> Why do certain political ideas take root and gain acceptance while others advocated by the same party or movement do not? That question can’t help but come to mind reading R. Alton Lee’s Principle over Party: The Farmers’ Alliance and Populism in South Dakota, 1880-1900.

The Farmers’ Alliance and the political parties to which it helped give birth had a couple primary goals: government ownership of railroads, the abolition of national banks, and the free and unlimited coinage of silver. (Briefly, and perhaps inadequately, explained, free silver advocates saw it as a way to increase the money supply and, hopefully, make it easier for farmers to pay their debts given declining farm prices.) None of the three goals was achieved and, at best, they brought limited electoral success for political offices. Yet other issues these groups championed during the last two decades of the 19th Century were adopted near the end of the movement or after. These included the Australian (secret) ballot, direct election of senators, initiative and referendum, and a graduated income tax. Plainly, the lack of success on one front didn’t keep these organizations from changing the country.

To a great extent, Lee tells the story of the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist movement in South Dakota through its most prominent figures — Henry Loucks and Alonzo Wardall. Loucks not only helped found the Dakota Farmers’ Alliance in 1886 and became its president, he would go on to lead the National Farmers’ Alliance and was recognized nationally as a leader of the Populist movement. Wardall, meanwhile, helped lead many of the business activities of the Alliance and worked nationwide in attempting to achieve its success.

The reason the Alliance supported financial reform is relatively easy to understand. Difficult economic times meant farmers in the Dakotas and elsewhere were burdened by debt, including mortgages with up to 20 percent interest. At the same time, elevator and railroad charges to get grain to market meant little or no profit. The Farmers’ Alliance arose from numerous local social and political groups combining under its umbrella. Although wanting change in government policy, the Alliance also used cooperatives to try to help farmers. These cooperatives operated warehouses and grain elevators, while the Alliance offered farm equipment, twine, barbed wire and household items at prices significantly less than farmers could get on their own. It also successfully underwrote hail, fire and life insurance.

Yet these efforts did little to remedy what supporters of the Farmers’ Alliance saw as the underlying causes of the economic distress. By 1890, U.S. Census Bureau statistics suggested farmers were so heavily mortgaged they would never be able to pay off the debt given the cost of money and the prices farm products brought. Loucks and other leaders realized that the ability to legislate was key. Using original source and other materials, Lee details the formation of the Independent Party, its evolution into the People’s Party (commonly know as the Populist Party), and its political efforts. Yet while the Populists would find support and limited political success –including the election of James Kyle as U.S. Senator in 1891 and, in 1896, not only Andrew Lee as governor but both of South Dakota’s U.S. Representatives — they discovered that implementing policies was much more difficult. South Dakota had been controlled by the Republican Party for decades and resisted the Alliance’s major platform points.

The move from advocacy to party politics may also have foreshadowed the ultimate downfall of the Populists, at least in South Dakota. The political reality that required forming a party ultimately produced a crucial division. Lee explores how some in the movement came to believe that the only way to political success was through “fusion,” jointly supporting candidates with Democrats or so-called “silver Republicans” (GOP members who disagreed with the party’s opposition to free silver) in some races. Although they realized it might mean occasionally compromising on certain issues, they viewed it as the only way to obtain electoral office and effectuate change. Laucks was perhaps the chief opponent of the idea, believing it crucial for Populists to nominate and support only candidates fully committed to its platform and principles. “We cannot afford to sacrifice our principles for the sake of office nor yet can we afford to do it for the sake of temporary success,” he wrote in 1892.

Loucks was on the losing side of the debate. Fusion was unquestionably a reality in 1896, when Populists supported William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential candidate, rather than having their own. Although Bryan lost the election, fusion with South Dakota Democrats and silver Republicans helped produce the Populist success in the gubernatorial and Congressional races, although by by a slim margin. Loucks, however, may have been correct. Neither Congressman was re-elected and while Lee was, he was hamstrung during both terms not only by the effects of longtime Republican control of patronage but the need to gain support outside the Populist movement for various measures. Populism had passed its peak and the party would disappear, although many of its ideas would provide spark for the ensuing Progressive movement.

Principle Over Party makes clear that the Alliance and the Populist movement were truly grassroots organizations. No one knows how broad success by the Populist movement might have changed the country. Some historians view Populism as a true reform movement, others as little more than a relatively brief coalition of special interest groups. Regardless, like many grassroots movements it found difficulty when confronting powerful, entrenched and politically adept opponents. Although Lee doesn’t put it this way, the ultimate political reality was that farmers or agrarian interests stood little chance against large corporations and financial institutions. Yet Lee, a professor emeritus of history at the University of South Dakota, does an excellent job using original source material and related matter in not only taking the reader inside the movement but also demonstrating how large a role South Dakota played in both the rise and fall of Populism. That makes the book a worthy and important addition to the canon of South Dakota political history.

Henry Loucks, quoted in
R. Alton Lee, Principle over Party.